CWS is committed to working in partnership with organisations supporting front line work with disadvantaged and vulnerable children, young people and their communities, transforming their lives and providing them with life opportunities and the confidence to succeed.
Contact Information
Our Focus
The focus of our work is on indoor air pollution alongside complimentary initiatives to create a broad and sustainable reduction in unnecessary suffering, costs and environmental impact. The scope and scale for these initial pieces of work will be initially in an area of 7 Village Development Committees (VDCs) in the southern 'Terai' belt of Nepal, with a total population of around 51,000. Later projects identified can easily be scaled up to meet both need and funding opportunities. Furthermore it is hoped that by creating a consortium of like minded organisations in the region, combined applications for Carbon Finance funding, could be made for a much larger scale of activities. 1. Rationale Indoor air pollution is a huge problem in Nepal where most people burn biomass to cook their food. In the southern half of Nepal, population increases and lack of central governance, has decimated what little wood there was, and so people now burn dung that was previously used as a fertilizer. Exploring this further during meetings with community and mother groups, it became clear that mothers particularly see this problem, along with the lack of toilets and clean drinking water, as their biggest problems faced each and every day. The request to explore these needs using known clean cooking technologies came not only directly from these groups, but also in the call for nationwide activities to improve indoor air pollution, from the government of Nepal.
2. Technology Nepal has huge potential for solar cooking, and during discussions with leaders in this field, it has been proposed that locally assembled solar box cookers be tried for suitability and performance. For when there is no sun, contemporary clean burning biomass rocket stoves can burn available dung. Work will be needed to explore the exact design of stove, bearing in mind shape of dung formed, and also local foods cooked. To compliment these two technologies heat retaining ('Haybox') cookers will also be made locally and evaluated alongside the two above technologies. For other proposed activities (toilets, deep bore wells and bio-gas cooking) technologies and designs are known and available throughout Nepal.
Our Experience And Interest In The Four PCIA Central Focus Areas
In the communities of southern Nepal women face deep rooted discrimination. They cannot go far from their homes, even to find places to use a toilets and thus face not only social, but actual physical discomforts each and every day. Only through education, awareness and inclusion of all community stake holders can the introduction of new technologies and practices succeed.
We are interested in not only local assembly/production of clean air cooking technologies, but also providing training to local craftsmen who make very simple cheap cooking stoves using recycled materials, that with qualified input, can burn cleaner using less fuel.
We are interested in obtaining experiences and designs of generic rocket stoves that can burn dung of the type seen in southern Nepal and northern India. Furthermore we are interested in learning more about combined approaches for using solar box cookers, rocket stoves and hay box type cookers.
Our monitoring role would be of the actual projects implemented on our behalf.
Relevant Publications or Studies
None noted
Our Contribution to the Partnership
We are keen as an organisation to share experiences and learn from other like minded organisations working in this field. We ourselves do not see our role as one providing technology, rather we plan to create a practical synergy of an implementing partner and a technology providing partner working together to identify, create (locally) and disseminate in the communities. Our role would be the management of such partnerships; monitoring and reporting on projects implemented.
